"I don't think [Yates] was ever signed to it," the showrunner told Entertainment Weekly. "I never signed him, so he's not.

"I think he's [expressed] an interest in doing it and he's a very fine director, and I think he'd certainly be someone that would be on the list for directing such a project. I'm a big fan of his. But the project as he describes it would not happen."

Moffat added that he hopes to produce a Doctor Who movie "someday", but insisted that a proposal for a film reboot - unrelated to the BBC show's continuity - "did not happen".

"That whole proposal was not true," he said. "I can say that with authority because, as far as the BBC is concerned, I'm the voice of Doctor Who. So if I say it, it's true.

"The BBC own Doctor Who and, for the moment, I run it for them. So I can assure you definitively that was all nonsense - not the idea of making a film, we'd love to make a film, but the idea of a rebooted continuity, a different Doctor."

The writer claimed that rebooting Who for the big screen would be "writing the book on how to destroy a franchise".

"[Any future film] will be absolutely run by the Doctor Who production office in Cardiff," he explained. "It will feature the same Doctor as on television. It will not be a rebooted continuity. All of that would be insane."